Shaker & Company: Cocktails Get An American Twist

Neil Sowerby checks out a refreshing new sipping saloon

SHAKER & Company sounds like a spindly furniture store. Far from it. It’s a self-styled New Orleans-style cocktail saloon that gives you a reason to go partying along the rather bleak main drag into Camden (a ten minute walk from Warren Street tube). We arrived too late to sample its soul food offering, jambalaya, gumbo, crab balls with salsa, hush puppies and the like. The kitchen shuts at 9:30pm. We made up for it by rampaging through their inventive cocktail list, leaving the artisan beer offering and cult New York cider Original Sin for another day.

The neighbourhood retro setting is an antidote to over-schmoozy West End mixology dens – so too the cocktails, at an affordable £7.50. The vintage-inspired mixes spring from the inventive brains behind the internationally renowned Shaker Bar Schools. There are 500 premium spirits behind the bar as inspiration for manager Scott Walker and his team.

We made our own entertainment on a Monday night, but there’s lot’s going on – local bands, open-mic comedy sessions and the promise of the quiz team from Popbitch. Special cocktail events are planned for the basement inner sanctum, the Tasting Room.

Another reason to go drinking north of Euston Road. Those craft beery savvy folk at the Euston Tap, based in a stone lodge outside Euston Station, have opened the Euston Cider Tap in the matching lodge next door, now decked out rustically with hay bales to match the choice of fifteen different ciders (Original Sin crops up again!). Recommended from a rotating scrumpy roster: Orchard Pig from Glastonbury. One bottle to sip carefully: Pommeau, two thirds Norman cidre, one third Calvados, 17.5 per cent.

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